Newspapers offer a variety of genealogy records that you can use to trace back your family tree. Learn about the types of genealogy records that can be found in newspapers and discover the family history information that each record type contains below.

Obituaries

Obituaries are an excellent source of genealogical information. Obits contain your deceased ancestor’s date of death and burial place, and often provide details about their spouse, children, parents as well as other extended family.

Passenger Lists

From passenger ships arriving at naturalization ports to stage coaches traveling across the frontier, several types of passenger lists are printed in newspapers. These lists contain the names of our traveling ancestors.

Birth Records

Birth records in newspapers include birth announcements and birth notices. These records contain the name of the newborn, time, date and place of birth as well as information about the infant’s parents, siblings and grandparents.

Legal Records

Many types of legal records are made public in newspapers. Probate records, court case records and name change records contain valuable genealogical information such as ancestors’ names, relatives, places of residence and more.

Photographs

Newspapers record many of life’s special moments. As such, you can find pictures of your ancestors in wedding photos, family reunion photos, birthday photos and old photo illustrations and sketches often printed in newspapers.

Marriage Records

Engagement announcements and marriage records are commonly printed in newspapers. These records give the name of the bride and groom, and provide details about the wedding including family members and friends in attendance.

New & Improved Newspaper Search!

With GenealogyBank’s new newspaper search functionality you can easily search each of the genealogy record types covered here to discover more about your family history.

Introduction: Gena Philibert-Ortega is a genealogist and author of the book “From the Family Kitchen.” In this guest blog post, Gena describes how old newspaper articles about your ancestor’s divorce can provide valuable family history information to help with your genealogical searches.

I am always surprised when people assume life was so much better generations ago. After all, there was no divorce, drunkenness, or crime, right? Well the great thing about newspapers is that they document all of life: the good, the bad and the ugly. And yes, that ugly included events happening in the “good old days.”

Need proof that yesteryear wasn’t so grand all the time? As long as there has been marriage, some couples have regretted the day they said “I do” and looked for ways to sever that tie. One way to examine American divorce statistics is through U.S. census data. The following newspaper article provides statistics for marriages and divorces based on U.S. census data for the years 1887-1906. In that 20-year period there were 12,832,014 marriages and 945,625 divorces.

Morning Olympian (Olympia, Washington), 22 December 1908, page 4

Divorces are recorded in several ways in the newspaper, providing useful clues for further genealogy research. Some examples of divorce records that you can find in newspapers include notices to an absent party in the legal advertisements section, short articles about the outcome of a divorce trial along with other court actions, or even a longer article with detailed descriptions of the allegations, the trial, and the outcome.

The following old news article about divorces heard in the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) court makes it obvious that “the divorce business is on the increase” because of some apparent reasons, such as domestic violence and adultery. Consider the treatment of this unhappy woman: “A long story of extreme cruelty was related by Mrs. Caroline Pavlikofsky as a ground for divorce from Gotlieb Pavlikofsky.” It’s reported that in one year of marriage he had “frequently beaten her…drove her out of the house, threw a burning lamp at her, threatened to beat her brains out with a heavy pan, and such things.”

Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), 20 May 1893, page 4

A boon to genealogists are the newspaper articles that list the full names of all the parties involved in divorce court cases, including the judge.

In some cases you may get much more than just confirmation of your ancestor’s divorce from the newspaper. In the old divorce article example below you also get some additional information and perhaps motives. Historical newspaper articles about divorce cases can also include other important data like marriage date, some possible motivations to marry, and the complaints against the spouse.

St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, Missouri), 25 June 1889, page 12

Not everyone lived happily ever after. Divorce in your ancestor’s time period was a reality just as it is now. Search newspapers for references throughout your ancestor’s life in your genealogy research and you might be surprised by what you find out about your family history.

Introduction: Scott Phillips is a genealogical historian and owner of Onward To Our Past® genealogy services. In this guest blog post, Scott searches online newspapers to solve the mystery of why/how his ancestor’s hometown of North Hibbing, Minnesota, disappeared.

We all know how challenging it can be to find elusive ancestors for our family history and genealogy work. However, recently I had an almost opposite situation. I knew my ancestors and family members, but their hometown was gone! So I decided to give GenealogyBank.com a try to see if their newspaper archives might be of help to me.

I had often heard my father-in-law, Carlo (God rest his soul) talk about being born and raised in the town of North Hibbing, Minnesota. He spoke fondly of this community, what a close-knit place it was, and related wonderful stories of being a youth in what seemed like less complicated times. His stories would always end with the statement that the whole town was gone now. I was remiss in not asking how a whole town goes missing, but I never did ask.

GenealogyBank.com to the rescue!

I used GenealogyBank’s Advanced Search function and entered “North Hibbing.” I was thrilled when the search results page came back with 73 entries for the “missing” hometown.

As I scanned the newspaper articles, I was treated to snippets of life in North Hibbing. A billiard hall raid (complete with a signal system to alert the hall’s owners), meetings of The Sons of Italy Italian Lodge, the beginnings of the Greyhound Bus company—which started with a seven-passenger Hupmobile running in North Hibbing, and even a fellow who reportedly brought in his 49th and 50th wolf skins to collect the bounty.

I even learned about the North Hibbing lingerie thief!

Duluth News-Tribune (Duluth, Minnesota), 7 November 1922, page 4

Then I hit pay dirt with another article from the Duluth News Tribune. This article explained that some 40 residents of North Hibbing were suing to keep the city from moving the City Hall out of North Hibbing.

Duluth News-Tribune (Duluth, Minnesota), 18 January 1922, page 6

Odd, I thought—who moves a whole City Hall? So I searched further.

The next article told much more of the story. I learned that the residents’ lawsuit made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. This article, along with others, explained to me that the Oliver Mining Company owned the very valuable mineral rights under the city of North Hibbing. That was why the city agreed to move the City Hall, to make way for a mine.

In their lawsuit, the residents argued that it was unlawful for Hibbing to turn public property over to the mining company—but they lost their case, City Hall was moved, and the mining company got to work.

Duluth News-Tribune (Duluth, Minnesota), 19 October 1922, page 5

The railroad then abandoned the North Hibbing line, and the city began to disappear. Quickly everyone had to sell their homes and relocate. Not long after, the city of North Hibbing vanished to become a new open-pit iron mine feeding the burgeoning steel mills of Cleveland, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Then, as Carlo used to say, the entire town was simply gone.

So now I have a much more complete understanding of the missing town of North Hibbing and it has added greatly to our family history.

My next stop? Back to GenealogyBank.com so that I can try and find out what transpired in the old neighborhoods of my Czech ancestors in Cleveland, Ohio. All I know now is that those neighborhoods are six lanes of Interstate concrete. I wonder if my Czech ancestors fought the changes like the residents did in North Hibbing?

GenealogyBank has grown from 160 million records since its inception to over 1.3 billion records today. That is a lot of articles to search through to find information about your family history. Genealogists often approach GenealogyBank with a direct search—using a surname—searching across the entire database to make sure we don’t miss any genealogy records about the family.

Sometimes, though, the simplest search query returns too many records for you to reasonably examine them all. When that happens, GenealogyBank has created over a dozen targeted search pages to help you narrow down the number of results you get back. Here’s a quick list of these helpful targeted search pages to get you started:

Use these special search pages to narrow down your search to a particular type of newspaper article, as the following example shows.

Let’s say you’re searching for all the arrivals and departures of the ship Hector. If you search GenealogyBank just using the word “Hector,” you’ll get 400,000 hits. But, if you search the word “Hector” using the handy Passenger Lists link on our home page or in the left navigation pane of the Newspaper Archives category, you can narrow those search results to 14,000 passenger and ship records that specifically mention the ship Hector.

GenealogyBank Passenger List search for “Hector”

Even 14,000 records are a lot to examine. Limit the search again by a range of years when your relatives likely arrived on the ship Hector and you’ll have a manageable number of articles to sift through. Let’s say you are reasonably sure your ancestors arrived in America on the ship Hector sometime between 1820 and 1825—go ahead and use that date range in your search query.

State laws required that a legal notice of a probate action be posted in local newspapers. This was the state’s method to get the word out to all interested parties that an estate was going to be disbursed to the heirs and creditors.

These legal requirements varied across the country, but we can reasonably expect that the newspapers where our ancestors lived carried these probate notices.

Probate records alert you to the names of the deceased, the executor of the will and—importantly—the court where the estate was probated. With this information, you can then contact that court to obtain a copy of the complete probate file for further genealogy research. Remember that an estate might not be probated for months or even a year after a person died, so you will want to search for probate and estate records using a wide span of years.

Simply search the newspapers for the state in question for your ancestor’s probate records. I would suggest limiting the initial probate notice search to only a surname and a year. Depending on the number of search result hits that are returned, you could add additional information to narrow down your search for your deceased relative’s probate and estate records.

GenealogyBank has a fresh new look with enhanced search features to help you find information about your ancestors faster. We created this GenealogyBank “Guide to Searching for Your Ancestors” Infographic to quickly introduce you to some of our recent website improvements so that you can get the most out of your ancestor searches.

To search all of the records available for your ancestor in our online archives start at the GenealogyBank homepage and do a simple search for your ancestor’s first and last name.

Advanced Search

If you’d like to narrow your ancestor search click the “Advanced Search” link in the lower right next to the “Search Now” button for expanded search options. The Advanced Search allows you to include and exclude keywords, as well as specify dates.

About Our Ancestor Search Options

1. Ancestor’s Last Name

Enter the last name of the ancestor you are searching for. Try different name spellings and use wildcards to increase results (ex. Carol, Caroll, Car*).

2. First Name

Enter the first name of the ancestor you are searching for. Try using different variations of your ancestor’s first name to increase search results (ex. William, Will, Bill, Wm.).

3. Include Keywords

If you are looking for a specific type of record and wish to decrease search results enter a relevant keyword such as your ancestor’s occupation, university, hometown, etc.

4. Exclude Keywords

If your search results contain irrelevant records for your ancestor, try narrowing your search by excluding keywords. For example, you may choose to exclude all records from a particular U.S. state by entering the state’s name.

5. Date

If you know the date or date range of the records you would like to retrieve about your ancestor enter it here. For example, search a date range spanning years of birth to death (ex. 1850-1930).

6. Added Since

Use this handy feature to save you time. This drop-down menu lets you search only the new material added in the last month, sixty days or ninety days. This can be a real time-saver. If you’d like to search all the records, you can still do so by selecting “the beginning.”

New! Search Genealogy Records by Type

Now you can search genealogy records by type so that locating the specific record you are looking for is quick and convenient. Here is a list of some of the genealogy records now searchable by type:

It was just after six o’clock in the morning when the “Watch” spotted the flames at the Court House. The building was a total loss: the “spacious and beautiful Building, except the bare Walls, was entirely destroyed.”

It was an intense fire that lit up the skies of Beantown that cold winter night. “The Vehemence of the Flames occasioned such a great Heat, as to set the Roofs of some of the opposite Houses on Fire, notwithstanding they had been covered with Snow, and were extinguished with much Difficulty.”

Wow – I have found something I never noticed before in my genealogy research. A U.S. newspaper, theIrish American(New York City, New York), routinely published thousands of Irish marriage and death records from 1849 to 1914. No, not every Irish marriage and death record, but nonetheless an exceptionally wide coverage of marriages and deaths from across Ireland. This material is extensive enough that genealogists will want to thoroughly review this online newspaper for coverage of their family in Ireland.

Irish American genealogists quickly learn that Irish civil registration of deaths began in 1864. Wow! These Irish death records in the Irish American newspaper start in 1849 – 15 years before the official civil registration started.

Here is an example of deaths published in the 28 October 1849 issue of the Irish American.

Irish civil registration of marriages begins in 1864 for Catholic marriages and in 1845 for Protestant marriages. This collection starts in 1849 for Catholic and Protestant marriages.

Here is a typical example of an Irish marriage record: Thomas Mathews of Dunbar, County Louth, married Bride Somers of Court Brown, Askeaton, County Limerick, on 19 June 1895.

The Irish couple got married at the “Kingstown Catholic Church,” which is pictured in the center right of this 1895 image of Kingstown harbor. Kingstown is in Dublin County, Ireland.

Image credit: Library of Congress, digital ID pmsc.09881.

Reading further in this Irish marriage notice we learn that the bride was the eldest daughter of Michael Somers and the niece of John Fitzgibbon of Castlerea, County Roscommon. Wow – relatives in four counties are named: Louth, Dublin, Limerick, and Roscommon.

This is terrific information to help genealogists trace their Irish ancestry.

I never expected to find this depth of coverage of Irish marriages and deaths in a U.S. newspaper.

You just don’t see Irish vital records like this in American newspapers – but now you do in GenealogyBank.

Sometimes when researching your family history, it is difficult to find a relative—they just seem to have fallen off the face of the earth.

Did they go into the witness protection program?Were they abducted by aliens?Did they go on a cruise through the Bermuda Triangle?

Maybe they simply changed their name.After all, many people did opt to change their identity to start anew.Daily People. (New York, New York) 25 September 1901. page 1.

Russian immigrant Max Kaplansky decided he needed to legally change his name. He had become a naturalized citizen of the United States and a businessman, but found that his surname caused him “much annoyance in the society of Americans” and that he was “subjected to much ridicule.” In 1901 he went to the New York Supreme Court to request that his name be changed to Max Kapell because “Kaplansky” had become an obstacle, costing him “many opportunities” both “in a business and social way.” Court Justice James Aloysius O’Gorman agreed with him and granted his petition to change his name.

Kaplansky’s experience was something many immigrants with foreign names went through as they tried to fit in to turn-of-the century America. If your ancestor arrived in America around this time, perhaps he legally changed his name for the same reasons Kaplansky did.Sometimes entire families legally changed their names. In 1848, members of the Dore family petitioned the New Hampshire State Legislature to change their surname from Dore to Richmond. There were a number of other people in New Hampshire who wanted to change their names at this time, as shown in the following historical newspaper article.This name change record was printed by the New Hampshire Patriot & State Gazette (Concord, New Hampshire), 6 July 1848, page 3.

I have even found name change records examples where a person applied to have only their middle name legally changed. Take a look at this old name change record example. It was printed by the Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts), 8 August 1870, page 3.In 1870, Hannah A. Simonds, mother of Thomas Batchelder Simonds petitioned her local Probate Court to have her son’s name legally changed to Thomas Stanley Simonds. Interestingly the court required her to inform the public of this name change by “publish[ing] this decree once a week for three successive weeks in the newspaper called the Salem Register, printed in Salem…” and then report back to the court “under oath that such notice has been given.”So our ancestors often did change their names and over the years they could apply to various courts or levels of government to request this change. In these three legal name change examples the petitioners applied to their State Supreme Court, a state legislature and to a local probate court.

The key for genealogists is that legal name changes have been routinely reported in the local newspaper and in the case of the Probate Court of Salem, Massachusetts in 1870 – it required that an announcement of the the identity change be published in the local newspaper.

It’s amazing the genealogical information you can discover in newspaper archives to help you find missing family members.

The New York State Archives, a program of the State Education Department, is sponsoring the 19th annual Student Research Awards. The deadline for entry is July 1, 2009 and the contest is open to all New York students in grades 4-12 who use historical records in their research projects.Three awards are presented each year: grades 4-5, grades 6-8, and grades 9-12. The awards consist of a framed certificate, a check for $100 from an endowment established by Regent Emerita Laura Chodos and her husband Robert Chodos, an invitation to have lunch with the Regents in Albany, and a behind-the-scenes tour of the State Archives.

Eligible projects are computer-based entries, such as websites or PowerPoint presentations; exhibits; documentaries; performances; research for a historical marker, property or district; and traditional research papers.

The Grade 9-12 Student Research Award winner for 2008 was Alexandra Rheinhardt, a student from Cooperstown Central High School (Otsego County), for the documentary, Sounds of Conflict: A Cultural Divide.

Julie Daniels, coordinator of the awards program, explained that in order for an entry to be competitive, a substantial portion of the research should be based on historical records from archives, historical newspapers, museums, historical societies, libraries, local governments, or other organizations. She offered some examples of historical records: original letters, diaries, and photographs; meeting minutes; police and court records; ledgers, census records; and wills.